New: Publish or Perish now also exports abstracts

Introduces a new Publish or Perish feature: exporting of publication abstracts

Publish or Perish is a software program for citation analysis. It was originally designed to help academics present their case for research impact to its best advantage, even if you have very few citations. However, over the last decade it has also been used for a variety of other purposes, such as deciding which journals to submit to, preparing for a job interview, doing a literature review, doing bibliometric research, writing laudatios or obituaries, or doing some homework before meeting your academic hero. Publish or Perish has turned into a real Swiss army knife.

Publication abstracts

It is often useful to have access not just to the full bibliographic details and research metrics of a publication, but also to its abstract. From version 7.17.2677 (11 January 2020) onwards Publish or Perish automatically retrieves and exports abstracts for those data sources that make them available: currently Google Scholar (in abbreviated form), Microsoft Academic, Web of Science, PubMed and Crossref.

This helps a variety of use cases. You might for instance want to read publication abstracts when doing a literature review in order to establish the most relevant papers, import abstracts together with other bibliographic details into a reference management program, use abstracts for textual analysis in a research project, or even simply make a nice wordcloud of your own publication abstracts. Please let me know if you have found another interesting use for this new function or if you simply want to provide feedback.

Please note: you will have to resubmit your existing searches to obtain their abstracts in Publish or Perish after updating to the new release 7.17.2677 (or later). Just click the Search button for the search that you are interested in; the abstracts will be available as soon as the search completes.

Exporting options

Abstracts are now included with all the other data when you export your data from Publish or Perish to a variety of formats, including BibTeX, Endnote, ISI, JSON, RefMan/Ris, and CSV (for importing into databases and spreadsheets), as well a full search report. An overview of all the exporting options can be found in the Publish or Perish manual.

Here are the first two pages of the export of a "Search Report (Extended)", using my own publication record in the Web of Science as an example. You can still get the basic search report that excludes abstracts, but includes metrics and full bibliographic details. Very handy if you need a concise overview of this information for performance appraisals, funding applications or simply want to copy a list of your publications and their citations to a CV or website.

Here are the first two pages of the export of a "Search Report (Basic)", using my own publication record in Microsoft Academic as an example.

Both these reports were sorted by citations, i.e. the most highly-cited publications are listed first. However, you also can sort the Publish or Perish results by title or by year before exporting them if you want a alphabetical or chronological report, or by citations per year if you want to list your most highly cited papers corrected for the year of publication at the top of the report. It is all up to you!

Hope you enjoy this new feature. Please let me know if you do.

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